The Morning Plum

By
Greg Sargent

* Can Washington remain "civil" while GOP tries to roll back Obama's entire agenda? With the House set to vote to repeal health reform, the GOP leadership continues to seek a delicate balance between keeping the tone civil while pursuing the highly charged goal of rolling back President Obama's signature domestic achievement. Though leaders on both sides are paying lip service to the need to tread carefully on a political landscape temporarily upended by the shooting, today's repeal vote shows that there's no real way to paper over the deep ideological differences dividing the parties.

* The GOP's message discipline: Eric Cantor spokesman Brad Dayspring, on the GOP's use of the phrase "job killing":

"Whether it's job-killing, job-destroying, job-crushing, job-ending, job-eliminating, job-preventing, job-limiting, job-hurting, job-excising, job-removing, job-exterminating, or job-doingawaywith -- the point is clear. Too many Americans remain out of work because of laws like ObamaCare..."

* But more polling shows complexity of attitudes towards repeal: This week's Post poll finds more evidence, as I wrote yesterday, that the level of support for repeal is unclear and depends heavily on question wording. This was asked of those who oppose the law:

What do you think is the best approach to the health care reform law: repeal all of it, repeal parts of it, or wait and see before deciding?

Repeal all of it: 33

Repeal parts of it: 35

Wait and see: 30

Only a third of those who are already against the law support full repeal, while another third only wants some parts done away with, and the final third wants to do nothing for now.

* Also: The Post poll finds that 25 percent of those who oppose the law think it doesn't go "far enough."

* Lieberman's legacy: For all the justifiable anger on the left towards Lieberman, most recently for helping kill the public option and Medicare buy-in, his pivotal role in helping secure DADT repeal, a civil rights milestone, may go down as his number one achievement. My previous take on how he did it is right here.

* Mixed SOTU seating gains steam: Bipartisanship fetishists swoon anew as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton endorses mixed seating at the State of the Union address. I'm so old that I can remember when Hillary was widely seen as one of the most polarizing and partisan figures in American public life.

* Willful ignorance on Arizona shooting: Interesting point from DougJ of Balloon Juice, who notes that the bizarre absence of mental health experts from the conversation about rhetoric and violence is similar to "the debate over fiscal policy, where quantitatively illiterate Villagers' unsubstantiated fear of debt drowned out the voices of Nobel laureate economists."

* And Palin's response to shooting was an unqualified disaster: CNN finds her unfavorably rating is now at an all time high of 56 percent, and only 38 percent -- the Palin dead-enders -- give her the thumbs-up.

People fuss + fume about climate change. It is a concern. Much more deadly is the idmosphere. It was the accumulation & magnification of low-grade id resentments that burst forth hideously in WW2; kerosene id. You can grok how powerful this mythic archetypal energy is, what a pandemic it is, when you use ww2 as an eg. Now, id fuels you, keeps you alive; like fire when it isn't an insane conflagration, it can warm up the stew. When you invoke its bovine nature, ruminating, cud-chewing, violence-eschewing, you get the milk of human kindness.

All this crazy devil talk that id-anointed-creature rashly-chosen Mz PitBull (& ilk -- id-ilk) looses, and a frankenstein id-creature from the sewered lagoon like the id-puppet Jared -- you get a psyche-quake, a rupture of calm, contentment, of simple sane thrill. Adrenalin, idrenalin abuse can rend a society, a whole world, and intelligence is helpless before it. Wicked Id is quick and cunning, vigilant, ever offended -- parano-id. Id is supposed to protect you from sabertooth tigers, sabertooth neighbors, sabertooth friends, but when it hallucinates imaginary sabertooth tigers behind every grassblade, one is sick, not alert.

Narcissism, self-referential, self-reverential. Narcissus chanced upon a perfectly still pool in a glade. He inadvertently gazed down and saw his own unbearably beautiful face for the first time. He knelt on the bank and gazed adoringly into the reflection of his own eyes, mesmerized. He could not tear his eyes away from his own beauty. He was paralyzed by self-infatuation. He neither moved nor ate nor any longer shared fellow-feeling with his friends -- empathy left him. As the seasons passed, and he remained enraptured by himself, the gods at last took pity on him. They turned him into a flower which bears his name -- narcissus, a flower which loves to grow by the edge of ponds.

Paranoia is narcissism on steroids. Our present time is perilous. We cannot indulge the id-drug -- it will incinerate us and our beloved community. Worse yet than yelling 'Fire' in a crowded theater is starting a fire in a crowded theater. The incendiary talk is damn dangerous.

I don't understand why Republicans are seeking full repeal rather than just going after unpopular aspects of the bill like the mandate, which might undermine the bill enough to render it useless. Is it because only going after portions of it would be a pseudo-endorsement of the parts they aren't trying to repeal, is it just a committment to the promise of repealing the bill that they made to voters, or a legitimate belief that the bill should be repealed.

As for the job killing bill, I know my firm has gone into a hiring frenzy since the bill was passed.

I ran into one at the pst office two days before I left. When she said, "I LOVE Sarah Palin" i waited a moment for the burst of laughter. Then I realized she wa serious.

Everything she said after that was formula. You could hear the dust in the grooves. Abortion, Israel, yack yack yack. It was like hearing one of the trolls given voice. Spooky. When I remembered I was leaving I actually felt a swell of relief.

Claw, are you under the impression he is going to answer you now, after all these days? You ask everyday, usually more than once. What's the endgame here, because clearly he's not getting banned because of your requests?

And now Greg has the temerity to climb up on his hind legs and howl about the success of this orchestrated Leftist-media demonization campaign.

Leftists have conspired to focus on (alleged) "right-wing" extremism rather than the Zeitgeist shooters discipleship with Obama mentor, Bill Ayers.

When can honest folks expect Greg to "engage" in examining "the broader question" of the role of President Obama, the Extremist-in-Chief.
http://gatewaypundit.rightnetwork.com/2011/01/did-barack-obama-cause-the-shootings-yesterday-in-tucson

** Obama: “They Bring a Knife…We Bring a Gun”
** Obama to His Followers: “Get in Their Faces!”
** Obama on ACORN Mobs: “I don’t want to quell anger. I think people are right to be angry! I’m angry!”
** Obama to His Mercenary Army: “Hit Back Twice As Hard”
** Obama on the private sector: “We talk to these folks… so I know whose ass to kick.“
** Obama to voters: Republican victory would mean “hand to hand combat”
** Obama to lib supporters: “It’s time to Fight for it.”
** Obama to Latino supporters: “Punish your enemies.”
** Obama to democrats: “I’m itching for a fight.”

If Leftists really want to consider the atmosphere of violent language, they should start at the White House.

"Jared Lee Loughner, the suspected gunman in Saturday's Arizona shooting, attended a high school that is part of a network in which teachers are trained and provided resources by a liberal group founded by Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers and funded by President Obama..."

At least Lieberman did one last bit of good helping repeal DADT and in direct opposition to his good buddy McCain. But he'd have to spearhead legalization of full equality for gays to male up for campaigning for McCain/Palin. That wasn't just betrayal of his caucus, it was damned irresponsible.

Nobody needs to slander Palin. She's wantonly self-destructive. Nobody forced her to do that video, you know, nor to place herself at the center of the controversy just when the liberal press was starting to reflect on having jumped the gun with her. She instantly made that reflection irrelevant.

Palin had a cross hairs graphic on Arizona, it was a graphic Gifford had specifically criticized. It would have been irresponsible to ignore those facts.

What's clear is that no matter how many times or how many commentators clearly and unequivocally state Palin is not to blame, if you have the audacity to discuss the shooting and violent rhetoric in the same post/column/article, you will be accused of attacking the true victim of the Arizona shooting, Palin.

You will also be asked to apologize for anyone who said Palin has blood on her hands.

I all you Obamaton, media enablers mean what you are writing about civil, polite discourse, you must watch Obamacare go bye-bye, with friendly smiles on your faces and words of encouragement in your blogs.

I do not understand the desire for a "public option" as the only method for America to achieve a universal health plan. Many nations, like Germany and Japan and France, have regulated private insurance systems that were the natural outgrowth of their previous inefficient unregulated systems, and their outcomes are as good or better than the UK's NH.

My criticism is not against posing it as one alternative: the "public option" works in Canada.

It is against posing it as the Holy Grail by which all else is measured. This is because our current scheme of publicly funding Medicaid is in fact the black hole of black holes. Were we to have seen efficiencies in that experiment I would not be so wary of "public options". Further, even our Medicare system, of which I am now a member, is not fully funded even though it is based on forty years of *prepayments!* Think about it.

The cost of medical insurance is a boulder sitting on the hill of medical costs. Efficiencies worth over 30% of total cost are available when attacking the "hill" - see Mayo's results, or Cleveland Clinic's or Scott & White's. ACA will attack the boulder by regulating the profits of the carriers and many of you will get rebate checks in 2012 as a result.

I do not reject "single payer" out of hand even with the M/M experience of black holeness - Shrink posted some good arguments for it during the debate. I do believe it is blind for the left to think that is the only road to affordable near universal health care, or to act as if it is a magic bullet, or to be unaware of the potential opening of a third black hole in the national budget.

As a heart surgeon I work out with says and as shrink has agreed, this ACA is a bill which does more to address access than cost. It is a potential windfall to the med carriers, and is limited in its pilot programs for clinic care and preventive medicine. But the experience of other countries is that they got serious about universal access first, not cost. And both the doc at the gym and Shrink agree this is better than what we had before - a universe of two docs, I understand, is small, but it is the best I can do on short notice.

Again, the left appears OCD to me about "single payer", just as the right, I might add, appears to not get that all our competing nations have lower cost outcomes than we do regardless of whether they have private insurance, socialized insurance, or socialized medicine - but *they all have universal coverage*.

"with friendly smiles on your faces and words of encouragement in your blogs."

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Yep, that's what civil discourse is, agreement. That's what Obama said in his speech, he said everyone has to agree or shut up. Your post is another strawman. You don't have to smile at the other side or agree with them. You just have to refrain from placing cross hair graphics or bullseyes over candidates like Dems and Reps have both done.

It will be a long, hard slog to eliminate the socialistic, budget-busting boondoggle we snidely refer to as OBAMACARE.

It will take a few years and bigger Republican majorities to do it. I hope the feckless RINOs do not mess it up.

The crafty leftists of the Obamacrat majority rammed it through as fast as they could because they knew their time was short and once enacted the bill would be difficult to repeal.

But, look at how long LBJ's WELFARE plagued America before it was neutralized. About 30 years of untold damage to American society and the complete destruction of the African-American family structure.

Let's hope Obamacare can be legislated away sooner. Hopefully before the death panels come for me.

I understand your frustration with...let me borrow the phrase..."There are none so blind as those who will not see."

And while I agree with virtually all of your actual points...sometimes lost in your stridency you wander perilously close to hyperbole.

One example...the lack of "community" in the U.S. versus other nations. I don't dispute your basic point but there are places in our lovely land with a strong sense of community.

And so Cao if you plan to return to the U.S. I suggest you check out St. Petersburg FL. We have 133 Community Associations...a system set up by our first two strong Mayors (about 20 years ago we went from a City Manager style to strong Mayor format)one a D the other an R.
If you decided to move to St. Pete Cao I'd tell you to check in with the Council Of Neighborhood Assns..the umbrella organization. Call a couple officers tell them of your desire for "community" and ask them which Assn's would fit your desires. Of the 133 about half are relatively dormant...another 1/4 are moderately active...but a 1/4..and these are for you Cao...are very very active including block parties...securing Gov't grants for neighborhood improvement parties..regular meetings....As someone who is relatively politically active in my community...Planning Commission...Mayoral campaigns etc (Not as a candidate but a member of several steering committees) I can tell you from the experience of visiting most of these 133 Assn's over the past ten years that some of them...at least that 1/4 I mentioned are as connected as your friends in Vietnam.

I don't dispute your basic point that it would be better for the USA if we had more of a realization that we are all in this together...but many of us...at least 1/4 here in St. Pete...understand that completely. I'm incredibly proud of what our Mayor has recently accomplished. He is an R...I was on the steering committee for his D opponent. (technically St. Pete municipal elections are non partisan but everybody knows which way candidates lean)
An R Mayor just had an old County building transformed into a shelter for the homeless complete with a panoply of services from various agencies to help them get back on their feet.

We still manage to do some cool things here in America as well. Hope that doesn't sound like a typical..waaaa I LOVE my country...but I DO. Having said that I am so secure in my love of country that I don't need to put down other nations or dis their health care systems or choice of Gov't to make me feel better about America.
There is room on this globe for more than one "exceptional" country.

@ashot: "As for the job killing bill, I know my firm has gone into a hiring frenzy since the bill was passed."

This is an aspect of poll-tested, neuro-linguistic programming and associative conditioning in modern politics that drives me nuts. It's based on the theory that you can taking anything people generally don't like (job killing) or do like (job creating) and associate it with something like the healthcare bill that could possibly do either but not likely to do either in significant quantities (nurses and doctors will still be required, the amount of patients will, hopefully, not explode, requiring huge amounts of new doctors and nurses to deal with them, etc., etc).

They might as well call it the "puppy strangling cheating girlfriend angry boss healthcare bill"!

ashotinthedark, no one here is asking for apologies. I like it when Palin hatrers post that she has blood on her hands.
-------------------------------------

That's not true. Skip has repeatedly asked for an apology.

I googled that poll question and didn't find a link, do you have one?

Battleground-

It took almost a year to get the bill passed, while that may be as fast the dems could pass the bill, the ultimate point you are trying to make is laughable. There was tons of debate, both in public and in Congress.

Establishment Republicans were dealt a lucky hand with the last two weeks events and can watch Palin continue to implode without having to do the dirty work themselves. If the critical point hasn't been reached, it will be soon. It will be acknowledged that she is not going to run.

And then, they will again become her fiercest defenders for she has been maltreated by the media and the left in a manner unprecedented in about 2000 years.

And when she gives her next speech, there will be no trace of writing on her palms but there may be stigmata.

Considering that there is really no way to indicate how the health care bill has effected the economy yet (esp. considering much of it hasn't gone into effect) without massive manipulation of the data...how about you stop praising the GOP for "message discipline"?

They are intellectually dishonest, at best, and flat out lying, at worst. It's not really a quality to praise. Instead, maybe journalists should stop treating this like a game of Scene-It or something, and present these yahoos with facts counter to their dubious arguments and force them to actually live in reality.

They might as well call it the "puppy strangling cheating girlfriend angry boss healthcare bill"!

Posted by: Kevin_Willis
-----------------------------------------

Yeah, it's such a broad and worthless claim that it is nearly impossible to prove/disprove and probably not worth the time attempting to do so.

I just like pretending that my personal experiences are applicable on a national scale. Nevermind that I work at a law firm that practice health care law almost exclusively. My experience has to be just like everyone else's.

Thanks for that Stewart link. I missed last night. That was his best bit since Team Evil faced off against Team Stupid.

My favorite part...when Stewart played Palin saying the left if it wasn't for their double standards the left has no standards at all." As Stewart observed she's just insulted a pretty large swath of our nation. Then the Campaign sign was priceless... Of course Red White And Blue with the lines..

@claw: "3. Do you approve or disapprove of Palin having the audicity of going on television the same day as Obama, using a Jewish slur, and making herself out to be the true victim of the Arizona shootings?"

Really? From what poll? Because that seems kinda, I dunno, unlikely. But I'd be interested to find out about it, if it were true.

@bsimon - Thanks. They were already pushing her into the fringes but that was always a tricky proposition, given her base and the electoral necessity of not alienating that activist crowd. It's a pretty perfect out for them. And now they can go on to pretending they were always right behind her and take up the cry re her ugly victimization. Slick as a whistle.

"Those are the nation's most extreme conservatives praising Obama's Terrorism policies. And now Dick Cheney himself -- who once led the "soft on Terror" attacks -- is sounding the same theme. In an interview last night with NBC News, Cheney praised Obama for continuing his and Bush's core approach to Terrorism:

He obviously has been through the fires of becoming President and having to make decisions and live with the consequences. And it's different than being a candidate. When he was candidate he was all for closing Gitmo. He was very critical of what we'd done on the counterterrorism area to protect America from further attack and so forth. . . .

I think he's -- in terms of a lot of the terrorism policies -- the early talk, for example, about prosecuting people in the CIA who've been carrying out our policies -- all of that's fallen by the wayside. I think he's learned that what we did was far more appropriate than he ever gave us credit for while he was a candidate. So I think he's learned from experience.

Cheney was then specifically asked whether he stood by his early attacks on Obama's national security policies -- "You said you believe President Obama has made America less safe. That he's actually raised the risk of attack. Do you still feel that way?" -- and Cheney, not exactly known for changing his mind, essentially said that, thanks to Obama's continuity, he now does not:

Well, when I made that comment, I was concerned that the counterterrorism policies that we'd put in place after 9/11 that had kept the nation safe for over seven years were being sort of rapidly discarded. Or he was going to attempt to discard them. . . . As I say, I think he's found it necessary to be more sympathetic to the kinds of things we did.
"

Greenwald's conclusion:

"If Obama has indeed changed his mind over the last two years as a result of all the Secret Scary Things he's seen as President, then I genuinely believe that he and the Democratic Party owe a heartfelt, public apology to Bush, Cheney and the GOP for all the harsh insults they spewed about them for years based on policies that they are now themselves aggressively continuing.

Obama has won the War on Terror debate -- for the American Right. And as Dick Cheney's interview last night demonstrates, they're every bit as appreciative as they should be."

"In November, President Obama and NATO proposed a new timetable for the end of combat missions in Afghanistan. The White House has said it will begin a gradual withdrawal starting in in July of this year. According to an Afghanistan Study Group survey, two-thirds of Tea Party voters believe that “Washington should reduce troop levels in Afghanistan or withdraw from the region altogether as soon as possible.” 67 percent of Tea Party supporters worried that the war would hamper deficit reduction.

However, after a weekend trip in Afghanistan to be wooed “away from the Tea Party” by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Tea Party victors Sens. Pat Toomey (R-PA), Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), Ron Johnson (R-WI), and Marco Rubio (R-FL) have all decided to ignore the Tea Party and rebuke the idea of any timetable for withdrawal as “artificial”:

My favorite part...when Stewart played Palin saying the left if it wasn't for their double standards the left has no standards at all." As Stewart observed she's just insulted a pretty large swath of our nation. Then the Campaign sign was priceless... Of course Red White And Blue with the lines..

"Half the country are immoral a@sholes."
Palin 2012

----------------------------------------

Her running party can be the Alabama governor and they can incorporate his non-christians aren't my brothers and sisters line into the poster somewhere.

Thanks for your well thought out post on HCR and the ACA and the merits of the various systems. As you have correctly pointed out all of the systems have examples of success and failure in their various forms around the Globe.

You mentioned Medicaid being the black hole...yesss but on the other hand Socialized Medicine in our nation is actually the most successful form in today's market in terms of cost/patient satisfaction and outcomes.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_29/b3993061.htm

"LOWER COSTS, HIGHER QUALITY
Roemer seems to have stepped through the looking glass into an alternative universe, one where a nationwide health system that is run and financed by the federal government provides the best medical care in America. But it's true -- if you want to be sure of top-notch care, join the military. The 154 hospitals and 875 clinics run by the Veterans Affairs Dept. have been ranked best-in-class by a number of independent groups on a broad range of measures, from chronic care to heart disease treatment to percentage of members who receive flu shots. It offers all the same services, and sometimes more, than private sector providers.

This keeps happening despite the fact that the VA spends an average of $5,000 per patient, vs. the national average of $6,300."

To be clear Mark I am not advocating a VA for all..or socialized medicine in our nation..even though we see how effective it can be. I just don't believe our nation is psychologically prepared to even consider such a thing.

I do respect your point about Single Payer or ANY system not representing the Holy Grail. IMO I would like to see a hybrid single payer that would operate similar to the newly reformed student loan program.

The private insurance companies would no longer act as salespeople but simply as administrators of a Gov't Program. Again our public utilities are private but highly regulated...we have no problem with that..is our health not at least as important as our power?

I reluctantly supported ACA because as you point out Mark and as the Dems touted..it is a starting point towards universal coverage...flawed absolutely..but at least a start.

As for cost until we get rid of the demagogues like Sister Sarah who obliterate any intelligent discussion about cost with absurdities about "death panels" Palin dictionary..triage=death panels. EVERY other country in the world sets a budget for health care and then they do their best to divide that care as fairly and "rationally" as possible. 88 year old women are not getting pap smears and colonscopies....28 year old citizens are not going without health care...

Until we can come to grips with how to divide up a finite resource..it really won't matter which system we employ to distribute the care.

Look at transcripts of CNN programs in the month leading up to the shootings shows that the network was filled with references to "crosshairs" -- and once even used the term to suggest the targeting of Palin herself. Some examples:
http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/2011/01/banning-crosshairs-cnn-used-it-refer-palin-bachmann?utm_source=feedburner+BeltwayConfidential&utm_medium=feed+Beltway+Confidential&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BeltwayConfidential+%28Beltway+Confidential%29feed&utm_content=feed&utm_term=feed

"Palin's moose-hunting episode on her reality show enraged People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and now, she's square in the crosshairs of big time Hollywood producer, Aaron Sorkin," reported A.J. Hammer of CNN's Headline News on December 8.

"Companies like MasterCard are in the crosshairs for cutting ties with WikiLeaks," said CNN Kiran Chetry in a December 9 report.

"Thousands of people living in areas that are in the crosshairs have been told to evacuate," Chetry said in a December 21 report on flooding in California.

"He's in their crosshairs," said a guest in a December 21 CNN discussion of suspects in a missing-person case.

"This will be the first time your food will be actually in the crosshairs of the FDA," business reporter Christine Romans said on December 22.

"The U.S. commander in the East has Haqqani in his crosshairs," CNN's Barbara Starr reported on December 28, referring to an Afghan warlord.

"We know that health care reform is in the crosshairs again," CNN's Joe Johns reported on January 3.

Seven uses of "crosshairs" in just the month before the Tucson attacks, and just one of them referring to an actual wartime situation. And one reference to Sarah Palin herself as being in "crosshairs."

Let's see some real investigative journalism on how many WaPo references to "crosshairs" and targets. 24/7 coverage from Greg. Now.

I understand that the word crosshairs has been used a lot in media reports and pundit commentary. What I don't understand is why it matters to you. I'm sure that you have a point to make, it's just not clear to me what it is. Could you state your concern more succintly?

@mmyotis Hi Tom. You seem to be a newer poster on the blog. Welcome. As others will share while the vast majority of posters here are thoughtful rational people.

Alas we have two...perhaps only one...hard to tell if KDE is one of RFR's sock puppets.
RFR has posted here under...we've lost count of how many sock puppets he has....but mostly we simply tolerate and make fun of him or feel sorry for him...depends on your mood for the day.

At any rate good luck getting a rational response from one of those two...or is it the same guy?

@All the regulars..

Is it possible that KDE and RFR are one and the same. Kind of alter egos...one tries to be a bit nicer the other specializes in absurd invective.

Because it evidently matters a great deal to Leftist-apologists for the Zeitgeist killer. They desparately want to smear Palin with their lying blood libel that her campaign map incited the Zeitgeist shooter-- rather than (as cited evidence demonstrates) the shooter's Obama-Ayers discipleship.

ruk, cherry picking on VA [and I wish shrink would drop in], I think it shares the efficiencies to be gained from clinic and outcome based care. I believe the San Fran clinic model has worked very well for the city and its people. Last report I saw on it was on PBS. I will try to find a link.

[rukidding7 bedwet: "Is it possible that KDE and RFR are one and the same"]

Here we see yet another paranoid specimen of Zeitgeist-shooter apologism, hoping folks will ignore the cited evidence of this lunatic Leftist's inspiration.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/2011/01/tucson-shooter-obsessed-bizarre-internet-movie

The cited evidence stands. Own the Zeitgeist shooter, Leftists. He's all yours.

Tom / mmyotis, last night you posted some good advice about toning down the rhetoric "whenever I can" but that really didn't answer my question: would you be able to tone it down if you were the target of blood libel to the same extent Palin was?

"RainForestRising, did you see that Hawaii's new Governor is now admitting that Obama's original birth certificate may NOT exist?!"
------------------------------------
Putting the truth, or lackthereof, aside for a moment, wouldn't another way of saying the same thing be:

"Hawaii's new governor is now admitting that Obama's original birth certificate may exist!"

Not quite so shocking.

Of course what the governor actually said is that he wants to prove Obama was born in Hawaii by showing a recording in the State Archives. WND et. al. interpreted this to mean he is resorting to the archives b/c the certificate doesn't exist. Of course they are also already saying the archive would prove nothign.

Thanks for the reply KaddafiDelendaEst. I think most people would argue that it's impossible to draw any link between the Arizona killer and any specific political point of view. That kind of leaves you in the minority. Which isn't to say you're wrong. History shows that the minority is often right. In this case, however, I suspect that that won't happen.

I'd like to suggest that you tone down the rhetoric some. When your points are valid, the ad hominem serves only to hinder their acceptance. Of course, that's only a suggestion on my part. Your welcome to serve your point of view in any way you wish.

"would you be able to tone it down if you were the target of blood libel to the same extent Palin was?"

I would like to think I would call for toning down the rhetoric rather than making myself the newest victim in Arizona, but that's easy to say and rather self-serving. What's clear is that the public wishes Palin had responded differently.

The framing of your question is interesing because it reinforces this idea that Palin really had no choice but to respond in the way she did. She's doubly a victim, apparently.

What's clear (from unprecedented death threats and blood libels against Mrs. Palin) is that Leftists wish the Palin family would be burned at the stake-- to expunge their collective guilt over the Zeitgeist killer rampage.

The Praetorian Guards of civility keep telling us that "words matter." Threats should be taken seriously, they insist. Except, of course, when those words and threats are uttered by those hell-bent on demonizing Mrs. Palin-- and silencing their opponents’ discourse out of existence.

And that’s a pretty good question. At what point is it okay for conservatives to fight back against Leftist blood libels (aligned with Leftist death threats) who want to intimidate and silence Mrs. Palin?

It turns out that the answer, according to Gandhi, is NEVER!

During World War II, Gandhi penned an open letter to the British people, urging them to surrender to the Nazis. Later, when the extent of the Holocaust was known, he criticized Jews who had tried to escape or fight for their lives as they did in Warsaw and Treblinka. “The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife,” he said. “They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.” “Collective suicide,” he told his biographer, “would have been heroism.”

The so-called peace (by "tone" appeasement) movement certainly has the right to make Gandhi’s way their way, but their efforts to commit collective suicide just won’t cut it among conservatives.

Gandhi probably wouldn’t approve, but most Americans and Israelis can live with that.

"Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit."
[Proverbs 26:5]

@ruk: ""I'm sure you just can't wait for things to get "better" after consolidation.""

Heh! I'm just going to hold on for dear life.

That having been said, consolidation has been a great illustration as to why the media is worthless. Don't worry over the bias--when you're actually in a situation, and you see the media coverage, the media is almost always wrong about everything, at least a little or a lot, but more than enough so that you can't possibly believe that people outside of the situation, getting their information from the news, have anywhere near sufficient information to draw any sort of reliable conclusion.

Which, when I think about it, goes to your argument about the 4th estate falling down on the job. But . . . I dunno, I think it's intrinsic in having a 4th estate. It's not that they aren't trying to do their job, but it's like that game we used to play in school where everyone would sit in a circle, and then one person would get a message, and then whisper it to the next, then whisper it to the next, and then by the time it came around what the last person thought it was was **nothing** like the original message. There's just too many levels between the news generation and the news reception. ;)

And, of course, down here, there's biases re: race, and, in local government, everybody is always trying to get as much money as they can, and always afraid the other guys is trying to take their money away. Sigh. Not pretty . . .

"Frayser High in Memphis has 90...90 pregnant school girls."

And they came from households where that was acceptable (if not how they came into the world), and they're all going to be on welfare, and (and this is often the mentality) they will get "paid" for being a baby momma. I'm not sure the real world economic math of it works out like that, but that does seem sometimes to be the expectation.

"would you be able to tone it down if you were the target of blood libel to the same extent Palin was?"

clawrence12, I'm as human as the next guy. In moments of anger I can and will act badly. But if I had the time that Sarah had, if the claims of my accusers were as absurd as those against Sarah's were, and if I was as confident of the justice of my actions as Sarah was, then I would have found it easy to had to compose a response that toned down the rhetoric.

Let me add that I don't think Sarah did a bad job of toning down the rhetoric. Her mistake was in choosing to employ the language of recrimination with the phrase 'blood libel'.

Are you aware that DEMOCRATS Alan Dershowitz and Ed Koch have defended her use of those two words? It's not like she gave the camera The Finger or something like that.

Posted by: clawrence12 |
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Maybe it's because I had never heard of the term "blood libel" before, but I never had a problem with her use of the term. I suppose a small group of people would have a legitimate repulsive instinctual response, but most people I think are feighning to be upset.

I just think she should have dismissed the accusation with a single sentence saying they are unfounded. She then should have moved onto something about this isn't about politics it's about the victims. She could also have urged people to tone down the rhetoric, but I wouldn't have hammered her about failing to do so.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach also defended her use of the term. Even though the ADL "wish[ed] that Palin had used another phrase" in the very same press release, they said it was inappropriate to blame her for the shootings and that she had every right to defend herself. Jews for Sarah said: "Gov. Palin got it right, and we Jews, of all people, should know a blood libel when we see one. Falsely accusing someone of shedding blood is a blood libel -- whether it's the medieval Church accusing Jews of baking blood in Passover matzahs, or contemporary Muslim extremists accusing Israel of slaughtering Arabs to harvest their organs, or political partisans blaming conservative political figures and talk show hosts for the Tucson massacre."

I certainly concede your points about the weaknesses of the 4th Estate.

I think however this is magnified as one moves down the food chain into smaller and smaller outlets. Your school consolidation issue and my battle a couple of years ago to keep a wealthy Brookylnite from raping St. Pete of about a half billion so he could profit from a new stadium...the problem in these two incidents are the limitations of coverage.
The Tennessean and the St Pete Times are the only major outlets along with the 3-4 TV stations and a couple of radio stations that still actually cover news. That sounds like a lot but it is really easy for a meme to develop in such a small universe and the media fails. Such as Baseball is an economic engine and new stadiums bring in more revenue than they cost the taxpayer...this is absolutely bogus but of course the special interests which included the Times (A huge Rays sponsor and also recipient of tons of advertising from the Rays) the C.of C. they never saw an issue that didn't require them to side with business over the taxpayers...perhaps some kind of momentum developed in Memphis and the media just ran with it...out of incompetence..sometimes laziness..and sometimes the media tells their audience what they want to hear...not the objective truth.

But speaking of epic media fails...lost in all the hubbub about Sister Sarah's hurt feefees was something that was horrible.
How did the media report that Giffords was FATALLY shot? Talk about running with rumors. As a former journalist this is one of the most embarrassing things that can happen. Forget silly speculation by pundits, pols et al about motives for the shooter...FACTS ARE FACTS and the media blew that one big time. How horrible was it? Mark Kelly told Diane Sawyer he spent 20 minutes in an airport lavatory crying his eyes out after he heard the report that Cong Giffords was dead. Just an awful failure by the press and nobody has really mentioned it much....but again that deals in FACT and it's so much more fun to deal in conjecture eh?

Paraphrasing Churchill? on Democracy...the 4th Estate is the worst way to get information..but our press with it's attendant freedoms is still the best in the world...or at least as good as any in the world. The 4th Estate is no different than school systems...banks..attorneys..there is excellence...there is absolute propaganda...and simple incompetence...
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